Kirjahaku

Seven months and twenty-three agreeably ill-assorted vessels are what were required to transport Gavin Young, by slow boat, from Piraeus to Canton. His odyssey teemed with excitement, adventure and colour. Gavin Young's account memorably distils the people, places, smells, conversations, ships and history of the places he encountered in what is his most famous book.The sequel, Slow Boats Home, is also reissued in Faber Finds. 'An unusual and fascinating book.' Hammond Innes, Guardian'Storms, fleas, pirates, bad food and bureaucrats ... My Young suffered what he did to entertain us.'Anthony Burgess, Observer

In this, the sequel to Slow Boats to China (also reissued in Faber Finds), Gavin Young tells, with equal panache, of his return voyage from the China Seas to England, via the South Seas, Cape Horn and West Africa.'I am decidedly envious of Gavin Young and his Slow Boats Home, successor to his highly entertaining Slow Boats to China . . . a fascinating, memorable book.' Eric Newby, the Guardian 'Like Slow Boats to China this is likely to become a classic of travel.' Francis King, the Spectator

This volume collects the best of Gavin Young's journalism. These pieces, by turn elegant, vivid and compassionate, display his acute understanding of the varied worlds in which we live.'Young is a born raconteur. His writing is full of visual impressions and touches of sensibility. He is driven more by people than by seats of power. But it is difficult to be a compassionate journalist without appearing soppy or sentimental. Young often achieves it. One finishes Worlds Apart exhilarated, moved, angered and enthralled: a tribute to its quality.' Jon Swain, Sunday Times

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors, the Ancient Sumerians.On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people. 'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

As an Observer correspondent in Vietnam before the American withdrawal in 1975, Gavin Young met many courageous Vietnamese people. He frequently stayed with one such person, Madame Bong, a woman who had lost her husband when she was only twenty-five, had recovered the mangled limbs of one son from a battlefield and watched as another son was sent off to a 're-education camp' for seven years. When Young was allowed to return to Vietnam he helped many of Madame Bong's relatives emigrate to the US. A Wavering Grace is a personal account of how one ordinary family survived the horrors of war and a political process that was beyond their control. 'By far ... the most moving account of Vietnam to be written in recent years.' Norman Lewis'This delicate, terrible and enchanting book ... brings the atmosphere of Vietnam so near that you can almost taste and smell it.' Jonathan Mirsky, The Times'Full of passion and feeling ... A Wavering Grace could be described as a love story [and] tells the story of Vietnam and Mme Bong's family in its many conflicting complexions.' Andrew Barrow, Spectator

In 1946 Roy Farrell and Syd de Kantzow's beloved, battered wartime DC-3 touched down in Shanghai for the first time. On board was a cargo of morning coats and toothbrushes from New York, forging the first post-war supply route across the treacherous eastern Himalayas. The international airline now known as Cathay Pacific was born.Gavin Young tells the swashbuckling story of an empire of the air, a thrilling, action-packed adventure that began in an era closer to Biggles and biplanes held together by wire and safety pins than to our own.'Pioneers like Farrell and de Kantzow would have had plenty of time to enjoy the dawn over Kangchebjunga. Would thye think of us with envy or contempt, cruising seven miles up with hundreds of passengers, air-conditioning, i-flight concerts, movies, hot four-course meals with an elaborate wine line and all mod-cons? . . . All this in forty years! Could the world have changed so much and so fast?' This is Gavin Young himself eloquently reflecting on the extraordinary changes in air travel. There can be little doubt where his own sympathies lie.

Gavin Young' s North American odyssey took him from Central Park and the old Atlantic whaling ports all the way to a tiny cabin in the Yukon, where Jack London heard 'the call of the wild'. Whether sleuthing through riot-racked Los Angeles in the footsteps of Philip Marlowe, crossing the Arizona Desert on Route 66 like Steinbeck's Depression-era migrant workers or searching for the characters of Cannery Row in Monterey, Young brilliantly uses the past to illuminate the present. 'Gavin Young is perpetually inquisitive, racially colour-blind, intrepid, reflective and gregarious ... plainly a man in a million, and a writer in two.' Bernard Levin 'He catches the mind's eye of the reader very deftly ... and, without losing his sense of irony, gives us a genuine account of the tragedy and the pathos, as well as the optimism and bravery, that created American civilization.' Christoper Hitchens, Mail on Sunday

First published in 1991, Gavin Young's hugely acclaimed In Search of Conrad was joint winner of the 1992 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.'Part-mariner's log and part-detective story, [In Search of Conrad] brilliantly evokes the Far Eastern landscapes fixed forever in our imaginations by Conrad's novels. But above all Young makes us realize that the world Conrad described nearly a century ago is still there ... the most pleasurable and exciting book I have read this year.' J. G. Ballard, Daily Telegraph'Young's passion for Conrad and his stories blazes from every porthole.' John Carey, Sunday Times'Young has an eye for atmosphere; he is marvellous on Singapore as her past impinges on the present, myriad streets stalked by ghosts from the nineteenth century ... In Search of Conrad is both scholarly and enthralling - always vivid, and often a hoot to read ... better still it may set you to reading Conrad again.' Independent'Gavin Young has managed to write something rare in recent literature - a happy book about the Third World which also has the ring of truth.' Jonathan Raban, Independent on Sunday